How To: Speed up your Samsung Galaxy S IV’s Performance

The Galaxy S IV is one speedy piece of hardware, but did you know that there are ways to make it run even faster? That’s right, no matter how fast the hardware is, software can bog down the final speed of the device. Here are some quick tips you can use to have your Galaxy S IV running at its full potential.

1. Turn off the S Voice Home Button Shortcut

Samsung’s S Voice feature is their proprietary competitor to Google’s Now and Apple’s Siri. Although you can ask it questions just like Now and Siri, we found ourselves defaulting to Google’s voice search for the most part, so it wasn’t necessary. If you’re like us, we’ll have you know there is a easy way to speed up the home button actuation. When S Voice is on, you can activate it by double tapping the home button. In order for this to function, their is a slight delay after the first home button tap where it waits to see if you will hit again to launch S Voice. This latency can be removed by disabling S Voice as shown here:

1. Open S Voice and tap the menu button to access settings:
2. Then disable S Voice from opening with the home key:

2. Turn Off Transition Animations

This is somewhat of a classic tip as it used to be an option on the first Galaxy S devices, and as an added bonus, it saves battery life. As you switch between different screens and applications, the Galaxy S IV automatically adds a transition animation for aesthetics. Although attractive, these transitions require extra GPU cycles and can stutter if your device is being taxed. You can disable them but its a bit tricky, here’s how:

1. First we have to fire up developer options. Open the settings menu and select more:

2. Scroll down and tap the Build Number section repeatedly until you unlock developer mode:

3. Go back to the developer options:

4. Scroll down to the Windows animation scale setting

5. Turn off animation:

6. Repeat for Transition animation and Animator duration:

3. Quickly Launch the Galaxy S IV Camera

The Galaxy S lineup has always been known for its speedy, high quality camera hardware. There is one limiting factor to its speed however, and that’s how fast the user can launch the app. Now you can maximize your camera deployment speed by placing it as a lockscreen shortcut.

1. Go the settings menu and select the My device tab

2. Select the Lock screen option:

3. Toggle Shortcuts into the On position:

4. Add the camera app

4. Disable the Unlock Screen Animation Effect

When you swipe to unlock the Galaxy S IV screen, you’ll notice a beam of light effect that spreads across the screen. This animation however can sometimes make the device stutter, and adding latency before the homescreen appears.